Leveraging Data Analytics Tools to Address Health Disparities

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on the health disparities that pervade the industry, with the virus widening the gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged patient populations.

Identifying these gaps – and working to close them – is critical for improved outcomes among all individuals, especially during the current healthcare crisis.

At Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation, leaders took action to get ahead of growing care disparities.

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"We intuitvely knew as the disease started to progress across communities and various parts of the country that certain ethnic groups were going to be disproportionately impacted. And there were a lot of different factors that were contributing to that," Steve Miff, PhD, president and CEO of the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation, said during a recent episode of Healthcare Strategies, an Xtelligent Healthcare Media podcast.

“To better identify these individuals, we created and deployed a vulnerability index, which was a real-time predictive model to identify patients at risk of COVID-19 infection. The model can also determine the severity of the disease in these individuals.”

In addition to the vulnerability index, the organization implemented a tool designed to calculate a person’s likelihood of contracting COVID-19.

“Given the highly contagious nature of the virus, and also the finite resources, public health officials need to assess several factors in real time with hyper-localized data,” Miff noted.

“The proximity index is a real-time predictive model to quantify an individual's risk of exposure to COVID-19, based on their individual physical proximity to confirmed positive COVID-19 cases. We created this proximity index to be able to quantify and provide, at an individual level, this type of information.”

Miff also stressed that in order to effectively diminish gaps in care, healthcare entities should be conducting these efforts before the onset of a crisis.

“Some communities are better at addressing these disparities than others. Those that are ready have not started to implement things across the community during the pandemic, but instead have done a lot of work beforehand,” he concluded.